I first saw Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, in September at Telluride. I generally disliked it, but I vowed to see it again at the New York Film Festival and, if my opinion had changed, update my original review. If anything, the second viewing solidified many of my initial, negative feelings about the movie, but I did gain deeper respect for the performances, particularly that of Nicole Kidman, who creates a magnificent villain with a vivid backstory, despite the fact that Baumbach gives her very little to work towards. I’ve updated my review to include some thoughts based on a second viewing; you’ll find the old version here, and the new version after the jump.

Margot at the Wedding is an intermittently fascinating acting exercise that barely holds together as a film. It plays as if Baumbach cut together a footage reel of master-class actors (plus Jack Black, who, perhaps emboldened by the company, somehow gives the finest performance of his career) workshopping characters, without input from a director or the backbone of a script. The characters are half-formed and/or disposed of unceremoniously, the themes are haphazardly integrated, the emotional arc is virtually non-existent.

And yet, some of those performances show flashes of magic, so much so that for all its faults, it’s not entirely dismissable. Baumbach’s script gives the actors plenty to work with in the moment, but the overall piece lacks dynamics.

Nicole Kidman plays the title character, a successful short story writer/prolific drinker who has developed a kind of perfect celebrity-literary scam: she projects her own self-loathing outward, and then drains the frustrations of her friends and family directly onto the pages of the New Yorker. It’s not entirely clear why Margot’s husband (John Turturro), son (Zane Pais) and sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to the director) keep letting her get away with this, but in the film’s best scene, her sometime-lover very publicly dresses her down for the same.

The film takes place in and around Margot’s childhood home on the New England waterfront, where her sister Pauline (Leigh) is living with her unlikely fiance, Malcolm (Black). Pauline seems to be some kind of new age philosophy teacher; Malcolm’s occupation apparently extends to drawing dirty pictures and helping out with man tasks around the property. In any case, no one seems to have to work over the course of a foggy week ahead of Pauline and Malcolm’s wedding. This gives Margot ample time to work two parallel, chardonnay-soaked plots: first she’ll try to exchange her husband for an old boyfriend, then she’ll break up her sister’s impending marriage.

There’s not a bad performance in the film, but Kidman is given the most to do. Margot is sprinkled with strange diversions into non-sequitor shock, most of which involve a family of unpleasant neighbors, and all of which give the impression that Baumbach needs to kill narrative time in order to strenuously prevent his characters from thinking about anything but their own immediate emotional states. With all these helpless solipsists running around within arms reach of a practiced emotional predator, Margot might be most successfully contextualized as a kind of monster movie filmed from the unstable point of view of the victims. Stalking the countryside, Margot picks them off one-by-one like Godzilla on a snack rampage.

But the joy of watching such high-caliber performances is undone, primarily, by Baumbach’s frenetic editing. The extreme jump-cutting doesn’t make Margot feel like Godardian–it makes it feel like a mistakenly-leaked rough cut. Baumbach’s stars have strong chemistry and seem to be doing interesting work, but you can barely tell because Baumbach is constantly cutting away from them. The pacing is most fatal in an early scene in which Margot and Pauline meet for the first time in years and immediately fall into a passive-aggressive argument. Kidman and Leigh are certainly doing enough to hold the viewer’s attention, but as if lacking confidence in his actresses’ ability to bring the pyrotechnics, Baumbach persistently cuts back and forth between their faces. It plays as though he’s trying to create dynamism after the fact to make up for what’s not in the script.

After I published the thoughts above (in slightly different words), but before I saw the film for a second time, a commenter on SpoutBlog asked if I was enforcing a double standard–after all, couldn’t many of the so-called mumblecore films be described in much the same way? I wrote a response to that comment right away, but the questions has stayed in my head, and really, it’s only after watching Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening last night that I can fully articulate my answer.

In Wagner’s film, Leonard Schiller, an aging novelist played by Frank Langella, explains that when he starts working on a novel, he has no idea what his narrative will entail; he begins with a character, and then he follows the character around, waiting for them to do something interesting. After ten years of following, Schiller (SPOILER ALERT) realizes the characters in his latest novel are going nowhere and decides to stop following them. He puts the pages he’s written in a box and asks a younger writer to take it off his hands. This first half of this process is very similar to the process behind, say, Hannah Takes the Stairs: the director and the actors started by creating characters, and then they stayed with the characters until they got to a different place. Margot at the Wedding plays as though Baumbach and his actors did the same, but then pulled a Schiller: realizing the characters were going nowhere, Baumbach picked an arbitrary place to stop and then handed the work he’d already done off to us.